Broadcasting Telecasting (Jan-Mar 1958)

THE STATUS OF RADIO-TV NEWS THE NEWS MEANS MONEY TO RADIO-TV That's the answer detailed in Broadcasting's study of news coverage There's money in news. Two out of every three radio-tv stations earn at least some profit from their daily newscasts. Stations that take their news departments seriously find this form of programming one of the more salable commodities offered to sponsors. There's also prestige in news. Good news service makes the entire program package more attractive. These and many other findings are contained in an exhaustive new study by Broadcasting. For the first time many of the financial, program and employment aspects of radio-tv newscasting have been surveyed on a national basis — almost an industrywide station census. The comprehensive Broadcasting study of the way radio and tv stations operate their news departments is based on information in 1,721 questionnaires supplied by stations. This is almost half of the stations now on the air (see review of survey "universe" at right). The project was undertaken at the suggestion of agency, advertiser, broadcast management, news and other industry executives interested in knowing the exact status of news in the 1958 broadcasting structure. The 1,721 -station universe is believed to be one of the largest station segments ever analyzed, aside from the FCC's annual financial reports. Details of this extensive undertaking are shown in the series of tables starting on this page. Here are some highlights: • Only a trifling number of stations reported 1957 news revenue down from 1956. • Eighty-five per cent of stations sell at least half their newscasts. • Larger-market radio stations showed the best gain in news income in 1957; radio's revenue from news is better than tv's record. • News revenue is less than 25% of total revenue in a large majority of cases. • Except in large markets, few stations pay special fees to read sponsored newscasts. • One-third of stations editorialize, mostly on an occasional basis. • Three out of four stations have a news director, usually reporting directly to management. • A majority of tv stations associated with radio operations maintain joint news staffs. • Some news copy is read by disc jockeys, announcers and other non-news personnel at a heavy majority of radio stations and at about half of tv stations. • Pay scales for radio-tv newsmen are higher than or equal to newspaper pay in the same markets, except at a small percentage of stations. • Well over half of radio-tv networkaffiliated stations depend more on wire services than on networks for a majority of their national and international news. A special feature of the broadcast news roundup is an analysis showing the relative amount of revenue obtained by radio stations from news, music and sports programming. Other analyses reveal the number of fulltime and parttime employes in the news departments of typical radio and tv stations. The number of newscasts per day (by length of program) at radio and tv stations in large, medium and small markets is revealed. A study of the number of daily newscasts shows the five-minute program to be the most popular, the number per day ranging up to 48 at some radio stations. Many stations emphasized in their comments that news programming is an important audience and prestige builder as well as important public service. They contended the value of news can't be fairly measured by the amount of revenue actually received from their sale, explaining how the whole station program package benefits from a strong news operation — especially adjacencies. THE NEWS UNIVERSE Facts gathered in Broadcasting's survey of the place news occupies at radio-tv stations were obtained from a questionnaire sent in January to 3,100 am stations and 490 tv stations. The data in the separate analyses are based on questionnaires from 1,501 (48% of total) radio and 220 (45% of total) tv stations. Questionnaires were identified by large, medium or small market, ,and by network or non-network affiliation. Fifty-odd questionnaires arrived after tabulations had been completed. A breakdown of the radio questionnaires follows: Large market stations, 52 network. 128 non-network: medium market, 252 network, 312 non-network; small market, 228 network, 529 non-network. Tv questionnaires were not broken into separate network and non-network categories beyond the tabulation point since the small number of nonnetwork stations did not provide separate information of statistical value. By size of market, the 220 tv questionnaires were divided as follows: Large market. 54; medium, 124, small. 42. BREAKDOWN ON THE NEWS SURVEY FOLLOWS ON PAGES 174 AND 175 ► Page 172 • February 24, 1958 Broadcasting